Some language skills involve analytical, sequential, and left-brain processing. Others involve right-brain skills such as guessing, associating, and getting the main idea.

Obviously, those with bilateral dominance have some advantages.

There are, however, good language learners with both left-brain or right-brain dominance who achieve a high degree of fluency and accuracy. They learn to use both left-brain and right-brain skills depending on what works best for the activity at hand. Read more…

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

Researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

This represents a process of “neural commitment,” in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.

In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older — 10 to 12 months — they were able to discriminate sounds in both.

Bilingual children also develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.

Getting a good night’s sleep has long been known to cement the day’s memories, moving them from short-term storage into long-term holding, but new research shows that it’s not automatic. A night of z’s is helpful only if you know a test is coming or, more generally, if you explicitly tell yourself you’ll need the information in the future. In other words, don’t expect eight hours of shut-eye to help you on a pop quiz.

The new research is the first to show how sleep works its memory magic. EEGs found that the “test is coming” group spent more time in deep, slow-wave sleep than did the group not anticipating a test. Slow electrical waves act as a replay button, causing the hippocampus to reactivate new memories and synchronizing the neocortex so that it accepts them into long-term storage. This expectant group also had more “sleep spindles,” bursts of electrical activity that prime networks in the cortex to store memories arriving from the hippocampus and to integrate them into existing knowledge, which makes retrieval easier.

Psychology Today also published a blog post on this topic by Faith Brynie, a scientific and medical writer.

Pink, a former chief speechwriter for former Vice President Al Gore, presents a convincing argument that the world is entering a new era — the so-called conceptual age — during which right-brained skills such as design and storytelling will become far more crucial than traditionally left-brained skills such as accounting and computer programming.

Your left brain is logical, linear, by-the-numbers; the right side is creative, artistic, empathetic. Oprah Winfrey talks with Daniel Pink about his groundbreaking book, “A Whole New Mind”, and explores how right-brain thinkers are wired for 21st-century success.